The retail petroleum industry utilizes various types of fuel dispensers for dispensing fuel to customers. In recent years, the retail petroleum industry has faced an increasing number of attempts at tampering and other security breaches aimed at intercepting personal and financial information of retail customers. The techniques involved in compromising a customer's personal and financial information can range from the simple, such as “shoulder surfing” as the customer enters the personal or financial information into the fuel dispenser, to more sophisticated and complex techniques, such as intercepting one or more electronic representations of the customer's personal or financial information as it is transmitted from the fuel dispenser to a variety of locations, such as a point-of-sale (POS) terminal in a retail fueling location or even a computer located at a payment card provider's location. Moreover, there may be other techniques for compromising sensitive information stored on the fuel dispenser, including customers' personal or financial information.
In response to the growing concern of tampering and other security breaches, fuel dispensers may include security devices to help ensure that, in particular, customer personal or financial information and sensitive data stored on the fuel dispenser remain secure. However, the current security devices may provide less than adequate protection for the sensitive data stored on the fuel dispenser. For example, a person determined to defeat the security devices installed on the fuel dispenser may accomplish this task by permanently removing a particular component from the fuel dispenser on which the sensitive data is stored. Furthermore, even if the security devices are designed to prevent the removal of the particular component on which the sensitive data is stored, a thief may still circumvent the security devices by, for example, stealing larger portions of the fuel dispenser encompassing the particular component.